


Various storms and saints

by queerly_it_is



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: First Kiss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 08:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4298583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerly_it_is/pseuds/queerly_it_is
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's nothing special about the moment itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Various storms and saints

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposting from tumblr.
> 
> Title from Florence + The Machine.

There’s nothing special about the moment itself.

If Ronan ever believed it would happen, he would have painted himself a catastrophe: someone dying, someone leaving; someone falling to pieces with just one last chance left to make something happen, creation in the instant of total armageddon. Adam melting into Cabeswater, becoming timeless and unfathomable. Ronan being butchered by night horrors, rendered down to his gore. Both of them surrendering themselves to keep Gansey safe from whatever’s waiting for him at the end of his king’s road. Maybe then the _I want_ would outweigh the _I am afraid_.

But instead it’s a warm almost-dusk in the musty room above the St. Agnes rectory, and Adam’s sitting beside him on his too-small bed fresh from his too-brief shower, the strands of hair across his forehead the same colour as the dust-bloated sunbeams slanting in from the wholly inadequate window.

Ronan’s looking at Adam. He’s looking because there’s a smudge of oil just below Adam’s jaw, faded like an old headline. He’s looking because Adam’s shirt is clinging to his collarbones and outlining the shape of his chest. Because Adam is a careworn, captivating thing, a pale and graceful carving stuffed into a hovel. Adam’s shoulder touches Ronan’s while pages of Latin homework lie sprawled across the splinter-prone floorboards, their white faces staring blankly at the sloped ceiling.

Ronan’s looking at Adam, and Adam’s watching him do it.

It’s not the first time, or the second or the fifth. But it’s the time where they both make a quarter turn on the frameless mattress and their legs bend towards each other where they’re laid out like a row of matches, one of Adam’s knees touching one of Ronan’s, their scabs not quite matching. Adam’s hands slide slowly out of his lap and Ronan’s sit in blooming fists against his thighs, his palms suddenly clammy. It’s the time where they move like a slow collapse, a rockslide set to a metronome, each thing following the one before while Ronan’s stomach twists around itself and his tongue gets glued to the roof of his mouth.

If Ronan had ever believed in it, it would have been a fast thing – a punch or an explosion, something to be talked about after the fact with the details all blurred together. Hindsight would never make his heart kick this hard.

It seems so obvious now that this would be the one disaster Ronan doesn’t want to run towards.

Adam leans in a little more, making sure to hold Ronan’s eyes, to be sure Ronan knows he knows. He glances down, a quick flick towards Ronan’s mouth. Ronan can hear it when he swallows, the clack of two stones.

“Ronan,” Adam says, and it’s not a question, because Ronan’s already led him across the minefield, over the snares, around the pitfalls. Any room for a question has been squeezed out along with all the air.

They’re going to kiss. He can picture it like a play he’s rehearsed again and again. His lips are tingling like a poisoning. They’ll kiss and all the landmarks will shuffle around and there’ll be no footprints to pick over and find their way back. Adam will touch him and Ronan will break his banks, overrun the landscape, drown the theatre. His heart will punch craters into the scenery. Already his mouth is flooding.

“Ronan,” Adam says, knowing, not a question.

“Yes,” Ronan says regardless, with the breath he doesn’t have, grabbing his share of the end of the world, his side of the curtain.

Adam kisses him—

Kisses him—

Keeps kissing him—

And Ronan kisses back. He tosses every weapon in the dirt, watches rust eat up all the barbs. Adam wins his way right through Ronan, soft brushes of his lips getting slowly deeper, surer, the feeling of his skin cooler and more chapped than Ronan’s, with a hint of something mossy that fades the more Ronan tries to find it. Adam’s kisses are stubborn and deliberate in a way that makes Ronan ache, tilt his head and tip his chin into it, opening to the smallest bit of pressure.

He was expecting a battle and instead he’s getting a bloodless coup. The lean length of Adam’s body props Ronan up as Adam slowly takes him apart, lips and tongue and teeth, all the determination of a revolutionary. Adam’s always been braver than he’s given himself credit for.

They pull apart and their breathing is the loudest thing. Ronan bumps their temples, for luck, in defiance, counter to all the places he’s showing pink between his scales. Every creature has its underbelly. He inhales and it catches, makes an inventory of his ribs.

“Still with me?” Adam asks, a blurry vision that’s wiped away everything else. His breath gently parts Ronan’s mouth.

“Don’t play stupid, Parrish,” Ronan says, aiming hard for something close to steady. “It doesn’t look good on you.”

Adam huffs and Ronan knocks their foreheads together, holds them there like some kind of exchange might happen and he could make Adam understand everything without ever having to explain it. He imagines dream chasing thought following wish, alighting from him to Adam like a flock of ravens. _See?_ he could finally say, _See what you are?_ But there are other things in there he wouldn’t want to push onto anyone, much less expose Adam to. Things he’d lobotomise himself before letting out.

So instead he kisses Adam, quickly finds the space between their mouths and snuffs it out, lashes brushing his cheeks when Adam goes with him, lets him return the kiss Adam left him tasting, both of them reaching for each other.

Ronan’s painfully glad now that his dreams have never given him this, because he would’ve gotten it wrong. If he’d given up every other dream, all his nightmares, dedicated himself to spinning this out of nothing, he could never have done it. Nothing he could shape would bear scrutiny next to the way Adam’s tongue finds the corner of his lips like a door left ajar and waiting for the barest push, or the stroke of Adam’s fingers along the tendon of his wrist, up and under his leather bands. Ronan spends a half-second like a firecracker’s death imagining something of Adam caught there, joining at the place calluses are meeting teethmarks left in worn leather that’s carrying the heat of Ronan’s body. He wishes they’d done this before the shower, when Adam still had engine oil on his hands, suddenly wants to be printed like a crime scene.

All his blood goes through him in a rush, an ambivalent tide dragging down a sandcastle, tearing down the battlements and filling up all the trenches, erasing everything done by a naive boy with his dreams, his plastic shovel. His hand squeezes Adam’s shoulder saying _You should stop me_ and his bottom lip slips soft and bruised between Adam’s saying _Don’t let me run_. He’s one thing moving in a hundred directions, all aligning either Toward or Away.

“Ronan,” Adam sighs, coaxing, up against his mouth, kissing his own teethmarks, raking nails up Ronan’s forearm and leaving him goosebumped, touching his neck like he’s never been betrayed by anything. He keeps saying, “Ronan,” like it suddenly symbolises all its opposites, like the water patiently smoothing out the coast. What can he do except crumble out his yeses and be carried out to sea?

Being given the thing you want is one of the oldest forms of punishment. But Ronan’s lived as an exile long enough to learn how to survive his punishments. That scorpion has no sting anymore. So he drips shivers down Adam’s spine with fingers on his nape, coaxes noises out of Adam’s throat with testing pulls of teeth. He finds Adam’s hand with his own and presses it to his ribs, his sternum, his neck near his pulse like he’s saying, _Here and here and here. This is where I keep you_.

They draw up borders and then step over them. He follows the shape of Adam’s working ear with two fingers, avoiding the insensate one, until Adam groans tight and low and bites at Ronan’s mouth and Ronan’s hand falls to the side of Adam’s throat like he can snatch the noise up in a fist. Adam’s palm slides sweat-damp under Ronan’s muscle T and up his back, over the braille of his spine and the tattoo he can’t feel but that Ronan imagines he can. Ronan maps Adam’s cheeks with brushes of his knuckles, soldiers on the wrong battlefield. So much war in them both.

Maybe that’s why they can do this for the first time and have it feel familiar, why Adam’s hands on his skin and Adam’s breath in his mouth, his tongue brand-hot against Ronan’s feels like a homecoming and not a trespass. He thinks about Adam at the Barns, surrounded by dreams, and greets his lack of surprise like a missing stair.

They move apart, minutes or hours later, the first drunken steps of time in this new place they’ve made. Ronan’s wet lips hold his twitching pulse between them as he blinks. Adam’s face is pink and his eyes are darker, heavier, full of shadows with live things coiling in them. Ronan’s chest heaves with a new species of adrenaline, all rustling flutters and deafening cries.

He grins with all the length and gleam of a machete and Adam answers it lopsided and with his _We just did that!_ breathless laugh, the one Ronan’s used to hearing alongside fresh scrapes and drops of blood and curses on Ronan’s lack of self-preservation. He licks his lips and he tastes of copper, watching Adam watch him. Their knees are still touching, and their arms, and most of their sides, making the small space into a smaller one, their newborn fragile universe. Adam’s expression is the one Ronan craves the most, that drives him to stunts and smirks and chaos. It’s a door busted in on a dark room, gauntly pretty in the sudden play of light, beauty not like other beauty.

“Well alright then,” Adam laughs, settling something. His Henrietta accent has come loose like a kite and started pulling on his vowels, connected to a string in Ronan’s gut that gives a sharp yank and sends everything skittering. Ronan starts to look away and then realises he doesn’t have to.

“What?” Adam asks, accent still unclipped but sounding collected, as if his lips aren’t bright red, like his ears aren’t pink and his neck isn’t flushed past the line of his frayed shirt collar. Like he isn’t looking at Ronan’s blood-filled ruin of a mouth with every other blink.

“Just thinking,” Ronan shrugs, exactly as unaffected as Adam. There’s sweat on the elegant curve of Adam’s neck where it meets his shoulder. That faint trace of oil is still there, but it’s been smeared to one side and up towards Adam’s ear in the exact shape of Ronan’s thumb. He absently rubs his fingers together as he says, “I need some new secrets.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am also [here](http://queerly-it-is.tumblr.com) on tumblr :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Various storms and saints [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4877548) by [KD reads (KDHeart)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KDHeart/pseuds/KD%20reads)




End file.
